Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates applauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat in his blog titled ‘India is winning its war on human waste’, he wrote that how the initiative is working to achieve the targets of Clean India and is changing lives of millions of women in India.
In a blog posted on April 25, Bill Gates wrote, “Nearly three years ago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made one of the boldest comments on public health that I have ever heard from an elected official. It’s still having a big impact today”.
During the Independence speech in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said, ” We are living in the 21st century. Has it ever pained us that our mothers and sisters have to defecate in the open?… The poor womenfolk of the village wait for the night; until darkness descends, they can`t go out to defecate. What bodily torture they must be feeling, how many diseases that act might engender. Can`t we make arrangements for toilets for the dignity of our mothers and sisters?”
Indian Prime Minister @narendramodi put a spotlight on a subject that most of us would rather not even think about: https://t.co/oUX40Igi6G pic.twitter.com/mJnCwhbo4U
— Bill Gates (@BillGates) April 25, 2017
Gates in his blog, gatesnotes.com, wrote that out of 1.7 million people in the world who die because of unsafe water and hygiene every year, as many as 600,000 are from India. Many number of young girls stop going to school because of unavailability of decent toilets.
Lauding the initiative Gates wrote, “So far, the progress is impressive. When it was started in 2014, about 42% of Indians had proper access to sanitation and today it has increased to 63%. The government is planning to finish the job by October 2, 2019, which will be the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth.
